The National Council of La Raza’s Institute for Hispanic Health (NCLR/IHH), in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is focusing on sharing lessons learned and expanding to build capacities of parents of youth and new community-based organizations (CBOs) that serve Hispanic communities to develop successful and culturally-competent HIV/AIDS prevention programs. This approach is based on a mentoring and peer-to-peer approach, building on the experience of the Latino Youth Peer-to-Peer HIV Prevention Program, Charlas Entre Nosotros, (CEN), a five-year project that was also funded by the CDC/DASH.

During our first year, Comunidad a Comunidad worked with two of the previous CEN partners who served as mentors to two new CBOs, Luz Social Services in Tucson, Arizona and Concilio Hispano de Cambridge, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The mentored organizations have received training, technical support, and IHH maintained continual communications with each respective mentor and CBO.

The current coordinators/trainers of youth leaders from Tucson and Hartford provided support to the new coordinators and trainers in the two new sites. This made a total of four sites during year one. The mentoring approach ensured a quick start-up of the Comunidad a Comunidad activity programs. By serving as mentors, the coordinators shared their experiences, the systems they used, and the level of success they had with each one. They also took the steps required to reach youth, present strategies used to spark youth interest, and offered a clear explanation of the effort made by both the organization and the community.

NCLR/IHH in collaboration with Advocates for Youth conducted a youth seminar, to complement the CBOs’ skills on approaching, addressing, and maintaining appealing programs for youth, and to share experiences from Latino youth in peer programs. CBOs affiliated with both organizations sent professionals serving youth and youth leaders. The seminar was three days long and the core theme was selected according to the needs of all participants. The dates, venues, and roles were jointly decided to ensure equal participation from both groups.

In year two, the goal of this project is to expand and include more sites, additional programs in different states or territories. By the end of this two-year project, CBOs providing services to Hispanics within the aforementioned areas will have successful, ongoing youth HIV prevention programs.

We expect to have at the end of year two, several sound programs geared to the community (i.e., parents) and school-aged Hispanic youth, to prevent sexual risk behaviors that result in HIV infection. The initial CEN project would, therefore, have expanded two fold regarding youth-led training groups, and Comunidad a Comunidad would have touched reached the communities providing information in Spanish (for Latino parents) to improve prevention efforts.